Torrington, Connecticut police department posted something rather unusual on their Facebook page.

Fugitive Jose Simms, 29, contacted the police station saying that he will turn himself in if the Facebook post calling for his surrender reached 15,000 likes. Sure enough, the post now has over 20,000 likes but Simms has not kept his end of the deal.

Simms, contacted by The Associated Press through Facebook, said he is serious about the offer. "I wanted to give them a little incentive for all the hard work they put in to catch me," he wrote.

The police department's unusual strategy has caused some backlash, however, as Maki Haberfeld, an expert in police ethics and procedure at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called it a "manipulation" of media, the law and the police force.

Here's the Facebook Post over at the City of Torrington Police Department's FB page:

They say necessity is the mother of innovation and a woman in India has proven this right!

In trying to cope with the rising temperatures of Ahmedabad, an Indian woman named Sejal Shah covered her entire car with cow dung. She claimed it kept the car cool without the use of air conditioning and was friendly to the environment. After a photo of her car went viral on Facebook, the woman was approached by a local news channel to explain her unusual method. She further claimed that the method of using cow dung as means of cooling places, was widely used in many villages in India, where people would spread the dung on their floors and walls, then leaving it there to dry, thus keeping the indoor temperature low.

Summer is here and this would be the best time to hold pool parties, backyard barbecues, and other fun activities you can only do under the sun. Try to relax and hang around with your buddies. And of course, you can't have a good barbecue without some beer. In this list, Uproxx compiles some of the best beers that go with your barbecue.

(Image credit: Samuel Zeller/Unsplash)

In the mid-19th century, American silver companies were doing pretty well, thanks to the tariff of 1842. It drove imports down, but expanded the supply of silver (and gold) because of the coins used to pay the import tax. Reed & Barton did well, and so did Tiffany & Co., but the real winner of the silver business was the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Gotham silver became legendary, not only because of the tariff that provided the materials at a lowered price, but also because of modern machinery, lavish design, and advertising that used the new tool of photography.

Because Gorham did much of the literal gilding during the Gilded Age that followed the end of the Civil War, the RISD exhibition and Rizzoli book devote a good deal of space to the insane variety of silver pieces Gorham offered customers in the second half of the 19th century. At one point, Gorham included as many as 1,000 different pieces of sterling and silverplate in its catalog, from humble crumb scrapers to elaborate epergnes.

The show and book also pay particular attention to a service commissioned by Henry and Elvira Furber, who made their fortune in the insurance industry. The commission, executed between 1866 and 1880, would eventually consist of 816 pieces—this service for 24 actually included 24 asparagus tongs—for which 20 oak cases were custom built by Gorham. Nor is the Furber commission even the most excessive example of Gorham’s output. For example, according to data culled from Gorham’s costing ledgers from the late 1880s, a single tea service might require more than 700 hours of elaborate chasing. That translates to three months worth of 60-hour weeks by a single worker, all to make the act of drinking a cup of tea more pleasant.

Read the story of Gorham silver and the wealthy people who bought it at Collectors Weekly.

In testament of the weird things that happen in Japan, recent reports from an investigation have suggested that someone had broken into one of the JR trains in the Tokaido line in Shizuoka and stole some of the parts and apparatuses from the train.

An inspection of the rest of the train revealed that door switches and safety devices were nowhere to be found on some cars as well, and since police found evidence that wires had been cut and screws had been intentionally loosened, the case is currently being treated and investigated as a robbery.

There have been no leads as to who could have possibly committed this crime or the objectives for doing it. Some speculate that the thief might sell the train parts to fans of Japanese trains, locally known as densha otaku or train geeks. But there are no traces or evidences of anything yet.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Mysterious coincidences can sometimes happen to people and in this little anecdote, we learn of the consequences brought about by messing with Japanese temple gods.

In 1928, the traveling couple Charles James Lambert and his wife Marie had visited Japan and found a neat little ivory figurine of Ho-tei, the Japanese god of good fortune, in a souvenir shop so they bought it. And by some weird coincidence, the couple started suffering from severe toothaches.

This went on for their whole trip even pushing them to get the dentist to pull out their teeth until the pain was gone. But it never relieved them of their agony. Until at some point in their travels and with some help from other people, they realized what the source of their agony was.

The Lamberts did not connect their dental miseries to their new acquisition until a short while later, when they were sailing from America to Britain. A fellow passenger, who was a collector of ivory, borrowed the Ho-tei overnight. The next day, she told them that she and her husband had both suffered from toothaches all the time the object was in their cabin.

Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, at long last, put two and two together. "We went over dates and symptoms carefully all the way back to Japan, and our hair rose in horror." Mrs. Lambert was all for throwing the sadistic little object overboard, but her husband, who by now had a thorough dread of the figurine, feared it might retaliate by "rotting every tooth in our heads." They decided the safest thing to do would be to return the Ho-tei to its compatriots.

Ironic how this statue of good fortune brought misery upon the couple. When they gave it to a Japanese art shop in London, the store owners became so excited in receiving it and put it on a shrine in the shop. That was the last the Lamberts ever heard of Ho-tei.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Xenco Medical has revolutionized the way we think about surgical tools. The company creates a vending machine that supplies sterilized, single-use surgical tools made from composite polymer, as opposed to the metal ones currently being used.

Metal surgical tools require resources and time to be sterilized every time before surgery, whereas using the vending machine, clinicians can use the screen to order exactly what they need and have it in seconds already sterilized and ready to use. Moreover, the composite polymer surgical tools have been proven to outperform their metal counterparts.

It would seem that married people are happier than single people. But according to Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science, this is only true “when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: f—ing miserable”. In fact, the opposite is true. Single people, specifically, are happier. This only applies to women, by the way. Men get happier when married.

Paul Dolan summarizes this clearly: “If you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”

(Image Credit: JillWellington/ Pixabay)

In the 1980s, the humble village of Soumousso in Burkina Faso, West Africa, helped battle malaria through an ingenious method: insecticide-treated bed nets. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes developed resistance to widely used insecticides, and the bed nets became less effective. Now, researchers have been testing a new countermeasure for mosquitoes — a genetically modified fungus that can kill these malaria-carrying insects. 

In tests in a 600-square-meter structure in Soumousso called the MosquitoSphere—built like greenhouse but with mosquito netting instead of glass—the fungus eliminated 99% of the mosquitoes within a month, scientists report in this issue of Science.

"To be able to clear insecticide-resistant mosquitoes to this level is amazing," says entomologist Marit Farenhorst of In2Care, a mosquito control company in Wageningen, the Netherlands. But Farenhorst, who was not involved in the study, emphasizes that the fungus is a long way from real-world use.

Still, this could be a potential weapon that can be used to fight against one of the world’s deadly diseases.

(Image Credit: Sarah Weiser)

Minnesotastan knows butterflies. He can identify all kinds of butterflies and tell you about their diet and lifecycles. Here he tells the story of one particular butterfly that he's kept an eye on for almost a year now. She is a Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) that overwintered on his porch in Wisconsin (yeah, I also was under the impression he lived in Minnesota). The butterfly emerged from her chrysalis just a few days ago.

Everything about this process fascinates me - the metamorphosis of course, but even moreso the remarkable resilience of a creature often portrayed as fragile and ephemeral.  The ability to fly upwind when you have the weight and shape of a Kleenex.  The adaptability to spend months as a crawling caterpillar, and then after dissolving and reshaping oneself to be able to fly away over a rooftop.  This is what fifty million years of evolution can produce.  Awesome.

Read the biography of one butterfly at TYWKIWDBI.

(Image credit: Minnesotastan)

The classic Hermes Kelly bag, while expensive, is actually quite popular - a lot of rich people, celebrities and royalties from around the world carry the bag as a status symbol.

This particular tiny pink Kelly bag, however, is so rare that it can only be found at auctions where its price can reach up to $100,000! It has eyes, a mouth, little legs and movable arms. It was specifically designed for the SOGO department store opening in Hong Kong. So if you're on the hunt for an extremely rare, expensive and tiny bag, look no further!

In 2006, Coca-Cola released their Coca-Cola Blak, which was a coffee-flavored version of the well-known beverage. Unfortunately, people did not like the product, and after just two years, the company stopped the selling of the said beverage and Blak disappeared from the market.

Nancy Quan, Coca-Cola’s chief technical officer, stated that bad timing caused the failure.

"That was a trend before its time," Quan told CNN Business. "I don't think people were ready to have a coffee portfolio within the Coca-Cola brand."

Now, thanks to evolving trends and palates, the company thinks the public is ready. And Coca-Cola is bringing Blak back — sort of.

Over the past few years, Coke has been releasing a similar product called Coca-Cola Plus Coffee or Coca-Cola With Coffee in international markets. The new product contains more real coffee than Blak did. There's also an additional caffeine jolt: The product is more caffeinated than regular Coke.

Today, it's available in Australia, Italy, Spain, Thailand and Poland, among other countries. Coca-Cola is "pleased with the initial response," according to a spokesperson. It plans to make the drink available in 25 international markets by the end of the year.

The company hasn't committed to bringing the product to the United States. But it's "optimistic about the potential for the beverage" in the country, a spokesperson said.

"I believe that there's going to be a space for a Coca-Cola With Coffee" in the United States, Javier Meza, Coca-Cola's global chief marketing officer of sparkling beverages, told CNN Business. He said the product could reach the United States next year.

What are your thoughts? Would this be a pop or a flop?

(Image Credit: Coca-Cola Company)

Dr. Susan Mackinnon needed help during an operation on a patient's leg. She had trouble tracing the saphenous nerve and its branches. So she consulted a medical text, the Pernkopf Topographic Anatomy of Man, with its highly-detailed illustrations, to find the nerve. She was able to complete the surgery and save the patient's leg.

But soon after this 2014 operation, she began worrying whether she had done the right thing. The meticulous, four-color paintings in the Pernkopf book, which she had received as a gift upon graduating from medical school in 1982, were created by Viennese medical illustrators who were such ardent Nazis they included swastikas and lightning-bolt SS symbols in their signatures. The drawings were compiled by an Austrian medical school dean who fired all his Jewish professors after the Anschluss (Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938), and were based in part on the bodies of people executed by the Nazis. The first of the two volumes was published in 1937, the second in 1941.

Mackinnon and her colleague Andrew Yee reached out to various experts about the ethics of using the Pernkopf illustrations. They included bioethicists, historians, and experts on Jewish law. Read their thoughtful responses to this particular question as it relates to the unique history of the Perkopf atlas at Stat magazine. -via Damn Interesting

Read more about the author of the text, Eduard Pernkopf, at Wikipedia.

Taking a little bit from Tyrion's final speech to the council of the lords and ladies of Westeros, stories are what tether us to who we are. Stories are the foundation of our identity, of our past, and thus, our future.

And since early civilization, when paleolithic humans were sketching stick figures in caves, we had already been passing on narratives, telling tales of what was or how things came to be, and we share that with a group of people with whom we find kinship.

If we are to take a deeper, more scientific or rigorous look at what folklore really is, perhaps it would reveal that it's not just about fairy tales or myths and legends. Folklore is at the heart of human society. It's simple but it can also be profound.

Here, C.S. MacCath explores the brief history of folklore research as a discipline and how it was developed from the nineteenth century until today.

(Image credit: Pieter Brueghel the Elder/Kunsthistoriches Museum; Wikimedia Commons)

Known as Inland Empire, the area within and around San Bernardino and Riverside counties houses some of the biggest warehouses and distribution centers in the country.

This is where most businesses store their retail goods until they are delivered. However, this has also caused major air pollution to build up due to all the trucks, trains, and planes that pass through the row of warehouses every day.

Becoming a crucial hub of international trade has been an economic boon to the area, but there have been consequences, mostly from pollution associated with the movement of goods.

The Inland Empire’s economic appeal stems from its geography — but so do its air quality issues. Fewer than 100 miles west, the San Pedro Bay Port Complex, which is made up of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is the busiest in the United States and the ninth busiest in the world.

Last year, it broke a record for the highest volume of shipping containers ever moved by a seaport in the entire Western Hemisphere. A significant portion of those goods doesn’t stay on the California coast long before being loaded up and sent east to be sorted and shipped from a growing network of warehouses within the Inland Empire.

The big question people are asking is why does it have to be all in Inland Empire? And the reason for that is that there's nowhere else for them to go. This is the hub for all storage and movement of goods. If you want it to make it big as a retailer, especially an online one, this is the place you need to be.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)